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Helen Salisbury: Did you save any lives today?

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Rapid responses are electronic letters to the editor. They enable our users to debate issues raised in articles published on thebmj.com. Although a selection of rapid responses will be included online and in print as readers' letters, their first appearance online means that they are published articles. If you need the url (web address) of an individual response, perhaps for citation purposes, simply click on the response headline and copy the url from the browser window. Letters are indexed in PubMed.

I completely agree that artificial intelligence will not, at least in the foreseeable future, be able to connect with patients as humans in the way that human doctors can. A robot would not think to give a palliative patient a bag of seed potatoes for his allotment, for example.

However, I do not think it is useful for us to repeatedly reference this fact in our defence, as if doctors and artificial intelligence are opposing forces in some battle. I too want the best for my patients and I really think AI augmentation of my work would help achieve that.

I work as an FY1 on a busy gastro ward and I rarely get chance to speak to patients in any meaningful way. This has taken a lot of the joy from my work and leaves patients uninformed and unhappy.

Every day I spend roughly 40 minutes clicking through each of our 21 patients, checking for abnormal blood results, analysing trends, prescribing the odd bit of sando-K and then printing off relevant tests for the following morning. Imagine a robot which could carry out these tasks instead and just provide me with a summary of its actions and important results to be aware of. This would allow me to spend 30 minutes of that time with my non-english speaking patient who is dying of metastatic lung cancer, working with a translator to actually get to the bottom of what is causing the pain I see, so I can properly help.

The same principle holds in GP land. Wouldn’t it be great if the 24-year-old who has a simple UTI, and can not afford the time off work to come to the GP, could talk to a chatbot in order to obtain an antibiotic prescription? You could then have 20 minutes rather than 10 to spend with somebody who really needs that time.

A big thank you to Helen Salisbury for an excellent reminder that continuity of care is a vital part of general practice. It is hugely valuable both for GPs and patients to have a good doctor-patient relationship, which has been shown to improve health outcomes, and should be part of the reason for being a GP in the first place. It is really important that with the current fashion to have bigger primary care organisations, which are touted as being more efficient (without a great deal of evidence), that the basic importance of continuity of care isn't lost. Thank you Dr Salisbury.